ck fifty
feet long, smoking your cigar, and eyeing the flitting forest or
meadow, amidst dreamy reveries of William Penn's description of the
populous tribes of the Delaware, and that first simple treaty which
consigned to the unwarlike strangers a country and a home, a treaty
which was a deed of disinheritance to the posterity of the donors, and
of destruction to their nation, of whom, in their own land, their name
has long been the sole memorial left.

In travelling, as I did much and alone, this was always the current set
of my day-dreaming. I never could draw on fancy to the exclusion of the
Red-man; but, on the contrary, constantly detected myself re-peopling
every wood with the wild forms of the aborigines, and in each distant
skiff that darted over the broad stream picturing the fragile canoe, and
its plumed and painted occupant.

The town of Wilmington, the chief place of the little State of Delaware,
shows very attractively from the river, with which it communicates by a
navigable creek, and, together with the neighbouring springs of the
Brandywine, is in high repute for the beauty of its scenery as well as
for its general salubrity.

Arrived at Newcastle, an ancient but not very populous city,--which
nevertheless possessed an interest in my eyes, from the circumstance of
my having chosen to write about it long before I ever dreamed of seeing
it,--you quit the steamer, and, seating yourself in one of the long line
of railway cars awaiting you, are whisked over the intervening neck to
French-town,--by courtesy so called, since the _town_ is yet to be,--a
distance of sixteen miles in about fifty minutes; and are there
reshipped on the Elk river, down which you rush, at the usual rapid
rate, amidst scenery that is really charming.

At the junction of the Susquehannah, the view up the two fine rivers,
with the dividing headland, the numerous winding creeks, deep shady
coves, and spacious bays, all well wooded and backed by a range of bold
mountainous ridges, calls for unqualified admiration, and cannot be too
often seen.

The vast bay of the Chesapeake now opens gradually out before you. On
the right lie the Gunpowder and other rivers, famous as the favourite
feeding-ground of the canvass-back; and here you find amusement in
watching the innumerable flocks, or rather clouds, of every denomination
of the duck tribe, which, disturbed by the noisy steamer, rise from the
water in numbers that hide the sun.

Boa